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C. Ross
Asked: 2009-05-14 04:42:50 +0800 CST

Shell script file name format

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What does the following shell script mean? This is ksh and npfile is also a variable that contains a file name.

fileName=${npFile##/*/}
scripting files shell ksh

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It strips the base off of the path to the file. In variable expansion, ## means "take the thing to my right, treat it as a pattern, and delete the longest match of it in the variable to my left."

    In this case the pattern is /*/, so the longest match of that in a variable which included a path and filename would be the path. Deleting it would leave only the filename.

    It appears to be a variable-expansion-only way of writing this:

    filename=`basename $npFile`
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  2. That trims "/*/" (everything from the first slash to the last slash) from the beginning of the string.

    So if npFile="/path/to/file" - fineName would become "file"

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